Biography

A native of New Hampshire, Roll Hardy moved to the Northwest and graduated from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2002. As an emerging young painter, he received several scholarships during his studies including the C.S. Price Award for Painting in 2002, Thesis Prize, Pacific Northwest College of Art, 2002, and The Venice Foundation Painting Scholarship, 2000-02. He has completed both private and public commissions, including a series of pieces for the Visual Chronicle of Portland collection. His work has also been included in group exhibitions including Critical Messages: Contemporary Northwest Artists on the Environment, which toured to Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA; Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR, and Boise Art Museum, ID; and Up on the Wall, 6 Painters from the West, Prichard Art Gallery, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID.

News

Roll Hardy: Painting Portland's Impermanent, Industrial Beauty

Oregon Art Beat

I first saw Roll Hardy’s work some years ago while sitting at the Produce Row restaurant, located in Portland’s east side waterfront industrial area. The small paintings hung on dark wood walls in a dimly lit room surrounded by deep green booths.

They appeared like windows with views to the surrounding industrial area, each image depicting the nearby aging buildings, train tracks, graffiti-blasted walls and overpasses, rendered with a bold and precise hand.

On View at The Dan and Gail Cannon Gallery of Art on the campus of Western Oregon University

Press

A chill is in the air at Portland galleries Laura Russo and FroelickThe Oregonian11/23/2011

At their best, Roll Hardy's paintings at Laura Russo Gallery, where they're on view through Saturday, can give you a chill right down to the bone. Like a tree in January, they're cool, clean, stripped of ornament and pretense. Just the facts, ma'am --but the facts leave little mysteries. Is this a soul-emptiness we're seeing, or an admirable fortitude, or just natural dormancy?

And so does Hardy, whose paintings similarly smell of moss and wood and wetness, and seek out the peculiar ripeness of the Northwest: Once-fertile places now abandoned but where "mystery and possibility thrive" somehow, in Hardy's words.

I think it's more the meaning he gives these places with his attention, with his smears, with his specificity. We don't usually think of the area under a freeway ramp or bridge, for example, as a "place."